Eric Massa's Secret

Long before the Eric Massa scandal broke, the congressman carried the lonely burden of another secret that, if revealed, would turn his world upside down. An extraordinary look inside the mind of a man in the crisis of his lifetime.

A text message appears, lighting up the cell phone in the cupholder of the rental car. Ting, ting. "R u at me house. Someone pounding at the door?"

I am not at his house. I'm pulling into the Rite Aid a few minutes from Eric Massa's house to buy toothpaste, so I type back, "No not yet." The sky over Corning, New York, is still the blood-blue of early evening, but it feels later. There aren't many other cars rolling off Route 17, and the town looks preserved and still. I turn off Denison, up Chemung Street, which gets very steep very quickly. Then ting, ting. "Just come around back. In the driveway."

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Five days ago, on the morning of March 5, 2010, Eric Massa called me and told me he had tried to kill himself. Tried twice, in fact. He said it happened while he was driving alone from Washington, D. C., to Corning, a disgraced congressman returning home to his district for good, and two times during the haul, he said, he had to pull over to keep from... well. Almost in the same breath he told me he was planning to announce his resignation later that day, and then he asked if I thought anyone would want to read a story about him. I had met Massa four years ago when I wrote about the financial hardship that running for Congress causes someone who has no wealth. He and I had stayed in touch, and now I am pulling up to his house.

Massa has been talking for days about the reporters storming his home, which explains the pounding at his door. Twenty-four hours earlier, after a brief trip to New York to be interviewed by Glenn Beck for a solid bizarre hour of live television, Massa walked out of the elevator to find a cameraman and a reporter asking him questions. Out on Sixth Avenue, a young producer from the Today show, an old guy from the Daily News waving a tape recorder, and somebody else with a camera trailed him for a whole block, asking about the groping allegations and the cancer and the tickle party and his sudden resignation from the United States House of Representatives. He smiled uncomfortably and held his wife's hand and simply walked on, responding to only the harshest questions, a kid trying to ignore the bullies on the playground. Once they were safely in the hotel lobby, his wife, Beverly, checked text messages. "Well, the first one's positive: 'Great job. We're proud of you.'" It was a boutique hotel trying to be hip--the lights were low and yellow. Massa was staring at a floor-to-ceiling aquarium when he turned to her and said quietly, "I'm sorry." She said, "There's nothing to apologize about. Why are you sorry?"

A couple hours later, a town car drove them to CNN for a satellite interview with Larry King. The car inched along Fifty-eighth Street, mostly in silence. A few blocks away from the studio, Beverly nudged her husband and said, "Oh, I see a beagle!" Massa turned and lifted his eyebrows wanly, and then said, "When we get near CNN, I'm sure there's going to be press waiting, both coming in and going out."

Nobody was waiting coming in or going out. And the next morning, the fifty-year-old former congressman from upstate New York who resigned either because his cancer has returned to again threaten his life, or because he has been a profligate and boorish sexual menace to people in his employ, or because he has been destroyed by the most powerful people in the country because he stood in opposition to them, depending on who's telling the story quietly exited the mediaverse and returned to his house and its enveloping silence, save for the pounding on the door.

Massa lives in Corning, a tired town in western New York, way out almost to Buffalo, in a big green house high on a hill, in the part of town where the Corning glass company executives live. A decade ago, a Corning executive was what he moved here to be. The plan was to work until retirement, set aside his Navy pension, buy a cottage somewhere, and live out his days with Beverly, reading his books about war and history and seafaring. Do some gardening, maybe. It's not working out that way, but for the time being he has held on to the big green house. Tonight the chipped-stone driveway is wet with melting snow, and the air at the top of the hill high above the town is damp and chalky. Behind the house a single light shines from the separate three-car garage and another burns dimly over the back-porch door. Most of the windows are black. It looks like a house whose owners, away on vacation, left a couple of lights on to create the illusion of activity. I knock a few times on the back door, but no one answers, so from the stoop I call Massa on my cell. Beverly appears after a minute and opens the door, her face drawn with lines of hospitality and desperation, like a woman sitting shivah. She motions for me to come in. The warm, dim kitchen is filled with the vaguely sweet smell of dinner. She is not wearing shoes.

"Eric's in there," she says, expressionless, opening her palm toward the long, darkened dining room, through the French doors in the front hall where the family photos hang one from every year since the two youngest kids were babies--and into the living room. There Massa sits at the end of the sofa closest to the fire it's a moody, cinematic fire, crackling and casting shadows--shoulders rolled forward, hands cupping a small glass of red wine, feet angled slightly in, eyebrows raised in either expectation or resignation, like a man in a waiting room. The window shades and pretty lace curtains have been drawn, so it looks like a room on a stage set. A photograph in an oval frame hangs over Massa's head: he and Beverly on their wedding day, 1988.

He looks up, head bobbing a little, and says in a voice that sounds sandy and soft in the big, dark room, "So now I'm a serial groper."

He lets that hang for a moment in the firelight. "They've got guys I served with in the Navy coming out and saying I groped them." He sounds bewildered, and maybe disgusted, and exhausted. "We're talking about twenty years ago."